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Poster: Samizdat Date: Sep 8, 2008 10:23pm
Forum: etree Subject: Re: Create Your Own `Feature for Streaming the Lossless`

Diana: Ogg-FLAC is a FLAC stream within an ogg container. FLAC is itself a container file, but not coded well to web-stream -- whereas even large ogg-FLAC files web-stream (damn, I dig that verbal construction) very reliably. You might get away with web-streaming a small or medium-sized FLAC for a few minutes at most, but eventually your player will seize up, and that's all she wrote. So yes, you got it exactly right, and I credit to you the chain of events leading to my lossless love affair. A couple years back or so, you pointed out to me a simple fact which should have been logically obvious: no quality increase is possible by upconverting (for instance, from 320 kbps .mp3 to FLAC). Once a show's (or whatever audio sample's) lossless virginity's violated, that audio sample is lossy till the end of time. You can mask it, and sometimes it's very difficult to detect. Let's say we take a 2L (the excellent Norwegian recording label) 8-track (not the dinosaur we old farts used to play in the car) surround .wav and violate it down to 320 kbps mp3. If we then upconvert to FLAC or some other "lossless" format, while we may fool the eye with all sorts of tweaks to fake a good frequency analysis and spectral view, it's more difficult to fool a good ear. For one thing, the volume is drastically cut. Samizdat
This post was modified by Samizdat on 2008-09-09 05:23:25

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Poster: xtifr Date: Aug 28, 2008 12:47pm
Forum: etree Subject: raw FLAC streams just fine for me


"You might get away with web-streaming a small or medium-sized FLAC for a few tens of seconds, but eventually your player will seize up, and that's all she wrote."


As they say on Wikipedia: citation needed. Who told you that?

The FLAC documentation suggests that Web streaming was one of their design criteria, and I just streamed 10 minutes of raw FLAC with absolutely no problem (since I'm now at work and have enough bandwidth to stream FLAC).

If your player seizes up after a few tens of seconds, I would be more inclined to think it's a bug in your player or possibly your OS. (Vista in particular is notorious for having problems with "unauthorized" media sources; I use Linux myself.)